Before the shopping Mall was built the Gaol housed Thomas Thompson
and Sons engineering works. When Thompson's were there all the old
cellblocks were still there and on occasion when putting in foundations
for machines the bodies of several persons executed there would be
discovered.

The Gaol was last extended in 1853. An account of this work was found
written on a door taken down on October 18th, 1955 (102 years later) at
Hanover Works.

The Gaol was closed in 1897 and then sold to Thomas Thompson. He was a member of
the Society of Friends who came from England in 1870. He founded an
engineering firm which specialised in repairing and the manufacturing
of machinery, chiefly threshing sets, portable and later steam.

He named the Gaol “Hanover Works”, which operated well into the early
1990’s.

During the first world war the Hanover Works became a munitions factory,
making ammunition cases and Bristol Fighter Wings. After the war
Thompson's reverted to building work. The Bishop Foley Schools (built
with the cut stone from Duckett's Grove Mansion), Carlow Sugar Beet
Factory, St. Clare's, Church Graiguecullen, to mention only three of
their contributions to Carlow town.

Note: St Clare's, Graiguecullen was originally A Church of Ireland
Church on the Athy road. Thompson's got the contract to dismantle it and
re erect it Graiguecullen. But that's another story.

During the Great War
of 1914-18 Thompson's of Carlow manufactured the wings for the famous
Bristol Fighter of the Royal Air Force. A couple of sets of these wings,
which were timber-framed and covered in linen, still exist in the
Thompson works, another can be seen in the Aviation Museum at Shannon
Airport and yet another in Carlow’s own county museum. One of these
vintage flying machines has been rebuilt, using a set of the original
wings supplied by the Carlow firm, Thompson’s also made a contribution
to the growth of peace-time aviation by building the first control tower
and hangar at Foynes, Shannon’s predecessor, where the flying boats of
Imperial Airways and the American Clippers came winging in during the
late 1930’s.

During World War II Thompson's built armoured cars for the Irish Army,
as well as a fleet of canal barges for the government, to cope with the
wartime fuel emergency by carrying turf to Dublin. These “G Boats”, as
they were classed by the Grand Canal Company, were built on bogies in
the Thompson shops and launched on the Barrow river. Of timber
construction without engines, they brought back, for the duration, the
era of the horse-drawn barge.

Plodding up and down between Dublin and
the great midland bogs, they built up that large stockpile of fuel which
those of use who are over forty can remember seeing in the Phoenix Park.
Those were the days when you went visiting with your sod of turf under
your oxter. But the end of the “Emergency” did not bring the end of the
association of Thompson's with the bogs, for they also pioneered the
manufacture of those remarkable machines used for harvesting turf by
Bord na Mona, who now produce four million tones of industrial pear
every year and make a valuable contribution to our supplies of electric
power.

Those armoured cars built for the army by Thompson's were marvels of
do-it-yourself ingenuity. Patterned generally after the Rolls Royce
armoured car, they consisted of plated superstructure mounted on an
ordinary Ford or Dodge lorry chassis, which had to be shortened. Because
proper armour plate was not obtainable at the time, Thompson's used
commercial half-inch mild steel plate. The most interesting part of the
car was the rotating turret with its slung seat for the gunner and its
heavy Vickers gun, ball-mounted to swivel in all directions, including
upwards against air attack and steeply downwards to repel boarders. This
ball-mounting was subsequently adopted by the British for their Ferret
scout car.

Thompson's turned out 46 of these vehicles, and during the war they
had a quiet time of it. In my own recollection I see them filing
sedately past the G.P.P. in Dublin at military parades in the post-war
years. But some of them saw action during the battle of Elizabethville
and in other parts of the Congo in 1961, when they formed part of the
equipment of the United Nations force. Never designed with an African
war in mind, their cramped cabins became ovens under the tropical sun,
despite the installation of an air-blower; and their high silhouette,
reminiscent of an elderly lady on an upstairs bicycle, must have
presented an excellent target to the snipers of the Katangese
gendarmerie.

Even when the Katangese did not possess the means to
penetrate Thompson's mild steel plate, the smack of a high-velocity
bullet on the outside released a lacerating shower of tiny steel
splinters within the cab, But despite these drawbacks the cars gave
noble service, and when the Irish U.N. contingent left the Congo they
were taken over by the U.N. and ended their days in General Mobutu’s
army. After the Congo affair a legend spread among gullible non-military
types that these products of County Carlow’s Ruhr had no reverse gear,
because it had never been contemplated that the Irish army might have to
retreat!